Viewpoint: The dance flooring from ‘Saturday Night Fever’? It is stayin’ alive

There is that ground again, that famed ground — geometric, most important colors, flashing in the perpetuity of pop culture memory, an icon of the very long-back disco period. Absolutely you’ve found it, pulsing beneath John Travolta’s system footwear in the 1977 movie “Saturday Evening Fever.”

It’s up for auction in Los Angeles afterwards this thirty day period together with other products of Hollywood lore, together with the Ark of the Covenant prop from “Raiders of the Missing Ark.” The auction is a joint task of Julien’s Auctions and Turner Classic Movies (on which ads have been relentless). At the instant, bidding for the dance flooring is at $50,000 the approximated sale rate is $200,000 to $300,000.

This news caught my eye since I haven’t just observed that flashy ground. I know it individually. I satisfied it in the decades after the movie, though it lived semi-obscurely in the club showcased in the film, 2001 Odyssey, in a Brooklyn community identified as Bay Ridge.

Who says Hollywood legends really do not have next and even third lives?

I played bass in a substantial faculty band identified as the Zones, and we rented out the club to enjoy. We’d charge $4 and give $1 to the house — a tidy profit. We packed the place.

We performed a blend of initial tracks and modern covers — “Message in a Bottle” by the Law enforcement and “Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)” by Squeeze often received a big reaction. About two or three tracks into our established, the man at the rear of the bar would switch on that floor, and any previous holdouts would occur out and dance. The plane would get flight. These flashing lights genuinely had an result.

We labored hard at the Zones, tougher than we did at our classwork (at the very least I did). There had been five of us, five heads of greasy hair that have been remarkable right until compared with some of the ginormous ’80s coifs bouncing up and down on the dance flooring. Futures as popular musicians evidently beckoned.

You’d believe examining about the auction would just take me back to all those days and get me wondering: What ever transpired to all those men? But there is no want for that mainly because I saw them a number of weeks in the past. I know just what took place to them.

It started off final yr with Dave’s thought — just after 40 many years, to reunite and report our originals all over again, this time with fashionable technology that will do away with the tape hiss, feedback and other flaws from the recordings we built in 1983 and 1984.

Dave performed keyboards, and it was his enjoying, I believe, that most established us apart. His Gibson G-101 included a layer of shrieking warm chords atop and amongst the guitars, bass and drums. He was tricky to go through in rehearsal. If he didn’t like a new music, for instance, he’d hardly ever say so. He’d just perform with small enthusiasm or, if he truly did not like it, simply just get up and stroll out of the space.

But in the e-mails and texts that flew close to about the reunion, he was not tough to browse at all: He needed us to get jointly, he booked the studio time, and he pushed right until we all agreed.

Matt, the guitar participant, arrived from North Carolina. Steve and Jamal, drummer and drummer-vocalist (of course, we had two drummers) came from New Jersey. I was the only just one who nonetheless lived in Brooklyn.

The hair was pretty much all long gone. Dave nevertheless plays occasionally with the ska band the Toasters, and Jamal is often difficult at operate recording this or that undertaking, but definitely, all those are the only two with toeholds in tunes. I participate in bass in the basement for entertaining (when I’m not looking at Turner Basic Movies), but it’s my son’s bass.

The auction web site claims that flooring was crafted for $15,000 for the movie and lived in 2001 Odyssey until the area closed in 2005. It is 24 ft by 16 feet and even now is effective. It seems like a modern, area-age thing in “Saturday Evening Fever,” but closeup shots clearly show it to be a reasonably primitive, analog affair, built of wood, with coloured light-weight bulbs beneath acrylic panels. Bidding finishes June 16.

The Zones had been an analog affair, far too. And we’ve traveled in time as that ground has — marriages, divorces and in close proximity to-divorces, overall health challenges, occupation successes and dropped employment, a total of eight youngsters, fatalities of moms and dads and those even closer to us. No grandchildren — nevertheless

We took our locations in the studio at our initially assembly past 12 months and plugged in. We’d had some Zoom meetings to program it out, but this was the minute of truth of the matter. Sonny, the engineer, was ready to get it all down — digitally.

It did not occur appropriate away, but it happened. Perhaps on the second tune, perhaps the third. It was like that instant on the runway when you are quickly, magically airborne. Forty decades on, we ended up however a band. Jamal always laughed loudly from his package when we sounded great, when it all clicked and we were in the pocket, and now he laughed extended and really hard. And Dave hardly ever walked out of the room. We have met consistently considering the fact that to high-quality-tune.

We’ve experienced our ups and downs, and no a single is a rock star, but we nailed those music. We are even now heading strong. Just like that famed floor.

Wendell Jamieson, a communications and political expert, spent 18 decades at the New York Times, the place he wrote sometimes on songs and movie.